A Separation

We saw where this first season of Borgen was going -- a wife less and less at home; a husband more and more fed up; a stagnating sex life; escalating tension so palpable it was making a kid long out of diapers chronically wet his pants from stress. And though we might have fervently hoped that Danish Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her husband Philip Christiansen (Mikkael Birkkjær) would work things out, it seems it is not to be.

The seeds of this conflict were sown in the series premiere, when the characters discussed the deal they'd struck: only one member of the couple at a time would pursue a high-powered job, while the other mostly stayed home, managing the children and the household. When Birgitte became Prime Minister, it was just about time for Philip to leave his job as a university lecturer and return to a CEO position -- but her landing the ultimate job in her field meant that he'd put his own pursuits on hold a little longer. At first, he seemed fine with this bargain -- justly proud of Birgitte and of her unique achievement, becoming the country's first female Prime Minister. But as the demands of her office increased, and both halves of the couple started to see just how different it is being Prime Minister as opposed to a regular old MP, Philip's references to "The Prime Minister" soured; no longer did the phrase refer to the wife he admired, but seemingly to a third party who was fucking up their marriage.

What makes Borgen so good is that neither party was portrayed as the villain in this struggle. Perhaps one's sympathies extended more readily to Birgitte because she's the show's protagonist and because she is doing something that literally no other woman has done before (in Denmark, anyway), so she has no models for how it can work. But when Birgitte can't unplug long enough to plant the garden on the weekend, or takes the family to the PM's official residence for an extremely formal "vacation," or saddles Philip with her visiting father because she has too much work to do to entertain him herself, his frustration is hardly unreasonable. They kind of both need a wife. And yet, though a brief exchange lets us know that they'd decided, at some prior moment, not to employ an au pair to help them out, by the time we learn this, things are too far gone for anyone to think that hiring one now would fix anything.

So, in the second-last episode, Philip meets a headhunter, and accepts a job as CEO of an electronics company, without talking it over with Birgitte: not cool. The imminent resumption of work he considers more important or meaningful than teaching apparently makes him feel virile for the first time in forever: ...cool? Birgitte decides that they can make it work and supports the new job: pretty cool. And all is well until she realizes that Philip's new company provided hardware for a bunch of new military planes the purchase of which has embroiled her government in a scandal: nooooooooooo.

And, again, I understand where both parties are coming from in the dispute that ends up marking the effective end of their marriage. Birgitte's right that there can be no appearance of favoritism if she's pursuing a policy of transparency, and that Philip therefore has to resign the job before he's even started. And Philip's right that she's making him leave his job because she can't fire her Defense Minister for essentially taking bribes. And Bent (Lars Knutzon) is right, once he gets Birgitte to admit what's going on with her at home, to point out that while the party supports working families, a politician's household can only really work if one parent stays home. (Like, Michelle Obama isn't still a hospital administrator, you know?) If Philip was never really content to put his real career on the back burner and embrace pretty much full-time parenthood, his resentment would have only continued to grow, whether this job had presented itself or not.

There is, of course, an element of sexism here, with Philip having a hard time being emasculated by his wife's important job. But to be fair to Borgen, the series began with a male Prime Minister and his extremely unhappy wife: spouse of a Danish PM is apparently a shitty position regardless of sex. It might have been nice had this couple survived the whole season as happy and loving and mutually supportive as they were when we began, but it might also have felt like a cheat. Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg didn't invent the works that made them famous out of whole cloth, and if a State Department employee finds it challenging to balance home and career, surely a (fictional) female head of state would have an even harder time.

Borgen's is a pessimistic view of how much stress a marriage can take, but it's probably a realistic one. (Other than the part where Birgitte tripped and fell and cut her eye on the corner of a table and still had to go on TV that night. That might not happen in real life.) And though we might think of Scandinavia -- with its robust social safety net and widespread use of bicycles for commuting -- as being further evolved than America, some feminist ideals are apparently still only ideals. But then again, while it might seem like Philip has betrayed the hopes we placed in him after the season's first couple of episodes, the role Birgitte would need him to play -- a cheerful political spouse who'd ignore his own ambitions for the sake of hers -- would be a shitty one if their sexes were reversed, too. Now her need to protect her own reputation has fucked with his professional reputation, and if he doesn't feel like they can come back from this, he might not actually be wrong.

Logically, I understand all that. Emotionally, I'm heartbroken.

Screen: LinkTV